What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that helps search engines crawl, index and understand a marketing site. How Goodspeed builds it into a new site or a migration.
Founder of Goodspeed
Technical SEO is the work that helps search engines find, crawl, understand and index a website. It is not the blog post or the headline. It is whether a crawler can reach the page, whether the URL is the one you intended, whether the page is fast and stable, and whether the markup describes the content clearly.
On a marketing site the usual technical list includes crawl access and robots.txt, the XML sitemap, canonical URLs, 301 redirects, schema markup, HTTPS, and Core Web Vitals. Information architecture sits next to it, because a crawler follows the same paths a person does.
Why does technical SEO matter?
You can write a strong page and still fail to rank if the URL is blocked, duplicated, slow, or orphaned. After a redesign, most sudden drops we are asked to look at come from technical misses: a missing redirect map, a noindex left on, a sitemap that still lists old URLs, or a JavaScript render that never shows the content to a crawler.
Technical SEO is also how you keep a site healthy once it is live. Plugins, tags and new landing pages slowly add crawl waste and slow pages if nobody is watching.
How does Goodspeed handle technical SEO?
On a new site or a website migration, technical work is in the plan from the start. We crawl the current site, agree URL patterns, draft the redirect map, set robots.txt, the sitemap and schema, and check Core Web Vitals on staging before launch. We then watch Search Console for 404s and indexation issues in the first 30 days.
If you are not moving platforms, a website audit or a Tune-Up at $5,000 can cover a defined technical pass. Full migrations start from $10,000. You can start a URL first pass with the migration planner.
What does a typical technical SEO pass look like in practice?
A marketing site is moving off a heavy CMS. Before design is finished we export every live URL, flag noindex and canonical mismatches, and list templates that fail Core Web Vitals. The new templates ship with self-referencing canonicals, a current sitemap, and a signed-off redirect map. Launch week is used to confirm that Google can fetch the new pages, not to invent the technical plan.
What are the common mistakes?
- Treating technical SEO as a checklist after the design is signed off.
- Blocking a staging site with robots.txt and leaving the rule in place on production.
- Shipping a beautiful JavaScript page whose main content never appears in the raw HTML.
- Changing URLs without a complete redirect map.
- Adding schema that describes a different organisation or a made-up review score.
Common questions
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that helps search engines find, crawl, understand and index a site correctly. It covers things like crawl access, indexation, site speed, structured data and a clean URL structure, rather than the wording on the page.
Is technical SEO different from on-page SEO?
Yes. On-page SEO is the content, titles and internal links a person reads. Technical SEO is the foundation underneath: can a crawler reach the page, is it the right URL, is it fast enough, and does the markup describe what the page is.
Do we need a technical SEO audit before a redesign?
Yes, if the current site already attracts search traffic. An audit before you change templates or URLs shows what to keep, what to fix, and what would be lost if the new site ships without a redirect map or a crawl plan.
How does Goodspeed include technical SEO in a project?
It is part of the build or the migration, not a separate upsell after launch. We agree URL patterns, redirects, sitemap, robots.txt, schema and Core Web Vitals during the work. Migrations start from $10,000. A Tune-Up at $5,000 can cover a defined technical pass on a site that is staying put.
Which related terms should you read next?
- Website audit
- Core Web Vitals
- Schema markup
- Information architecture
- Robots.txt
- The rest of the glossary
You can also browse the glossary, the resources hub, try the migration planner, or book a call.
About the Author
Founder of Goodspeed
Harish Malhi is the founder of Goodspeed. He left Google in 2019 to build his own product, and started Goodspeed to give other founders the same head start. Today the studio designs and builds websites and the whole digital experience around them for funded tech companies, at the moments that matter: a raise, a launch, a press cycle. Goodspeed is a Framer Enterprise Expert, was Bubble’s Agency of the Year in 2024, and has shipped 300+ products, including launch pages for an NVIDIA-backed AI lab and a Webby-nominated site for a Boeing-backed aviation company. It holds a 5.0 rating from 46 reviews on Clutch.
